Friday, October 12, 2007

A word of warning, unless you get some sort of voyeuristic pleasure from the misfortunes of others, there is probably nothing worthwhile in this post for you. This is probably more for me to be able to vent, and maybe use it as a reference point for any other time in my life that I think things aren't going well.

I've perhaps had one of the worst weeks of my life. I think the only other week to rival it was the last week of one companionship on my mission. Yeah, that sucked too. Every once in a while you will have a bad day, or a bad two days, but as I have learned in Genetics this semester, the probability of consecutive bad days is lower the more days you string together. For example, if I have 20% chance of having a bad day on any given day, having a week full of them would be .2 to the 7th power... or a .00128% chance of happening. At least by those odds I won't have another one in this lifetime.

As most everyone is aware this is one of the busiest weeks of the semester, when all teachers combine together to make your life miserable.

Tuesday night Thomas told me that Tim Filichia, a mutual friend of ours and one of the finest guys you would ever meet, died in a car crash Sunday night. It made me think of the fleeting nature of life and the chance that at any moment, everything we've done might come to naught. Maybe it doesn't come to naught, but sometimes it seems like it would if you were taken right now. Thomas, Kara, and I went to his memorial service Wednesday. It was a sobering evening.

Earlier in the week I went completely against my better judgement and tried to whole break thing thinking it would remedy relationship doubts. Well, it did for me at least, and it quelled most of my doubts. Sadly it was one sided and as of last night, I'm now single. Ugh...

So that leaves me today. Chad and I both weren't feeling up to the 5 miles we had planned. I slept in and got ready for my first class. I sat through an hour of O-Chem complaining trying to palate the limp jokes the teach made. Then I sat through an hour of Genomics trying to stretch my brain enough to remember what contigs, BLAST sequences, and ESTs were. After that, the fun began.

I spent an hour or so studying for the test in my predent class. I had already tried to take this Wednesday to find out it wasn't in the testing center. Then I tried to take it Thursday since the teacher had said it ran from the 11th to the 18th. Still it wasn't there. Finally on the third time it worked. I got an 82.5%. Then I went back to my study cove and spent a couple hours finishing O-Chem homework and studying the reaction and mechanisms. Then I took another trek over to the testing center at 4:30 to spend two more hours plugging away in the music room. The test was incredibly hard, but I think I did alright. After a few hours in the testing center one starts to stop caring.

I walked downstairs, curled up in the lobby and tried to study for my Genetics test. Since it was open book and I had downloaded the first 6 chapters in pdf I thought the test would be a breeze (the book wasn't in the bookstore till a couple days ago and between friends dying, and breaking up with people, I just hadn't gotten around to getting it). I trucked back upstairs, waited in line and got in at 7. I sat down with my laptop to realize that there were several questions on test that required an appendix that wasn't in the 6 chapters I had downloaded. In this appendix, which I had never had to use on homeworks, there was a genetic code chart, and a chi square value chart.

So there I sit in the testing center losing hope. Not only was my brain fried, by my emotions were a mess, and I didn't have the charts I needed. I needed to know the three stop codons. I managed to find an old homework file from Bio 240 where I had listed the three stop codons. I also needed to know the codon that codes for Serine. Searching my computer again I found another homework that showed that UCA was a codon for serine. That wasn't an answer, but UCC was and I figured with the wobble theory that would have to be the answer. Sadly I had no chi squared tables on my computer. So after being told by an employee that there was nothing he could do for me and that he was "Sorry," I started thinking about using the Internet on my phone the bathroom to pull up a Chi Squared table. Even though I was supposed to have this chart, I couldn't justify cheating. So I sat there frustrated as tears came from the whole week. I tried to pull myself together so people around me didn't think I was that pathetic of a test taker. I made my best guesses, turned the paper in and sulked home just as my watch turned to 10:00. Long day...